


Foreigner's God

by merrills



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Romantic Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-16 22:53:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29461578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merrills/pseuds/merrills
Summary: Cullen could barely breathe. His chest felt so heavy compared to moments ago. He wanted to move. To leap, to battle, to deliciously writhe between smooth sheets. To gasp and to stretch and to touch and to tear. To claim and to beg and to give and to worship. He yearned for unimaginable pain, and for sweetness, and for heat to match the one inside him.In the months after the events of Trespasser, Lavellan and Cullen have built a friendship based on honesty and growth. Lavellan has learned to say what she really thinks, and Cullen has learned how to examine his biases. So far, things have been strictly platonic.That changes one fateful afternoon.
Relationships: Female Inquisitor/Cullen Rutherford, Female Lavellan/Cullen Rutherford
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	Foreigner's God

“Would you like to pay me a visit later, Commander?” The Inquisitor asked lightly.

Like always when she asked, Cullen paused. Going over the question for the hundredth time: Was this a good idea? And as always, the answer was  _ No _ . Yet he didn’t decline the invitation.

“I would. Give me an hour to finish things here, and I will be with you, Inquisitor.”

“Wonderful. Thank you very much,” she replied cordially. She turned around to leave through the exit leading towards her chambers, but halted. 

“Inquisitor?”

Lavellan took her time. He saw her lift her face to where the ladder led. When she spun around, her eyes were slightly slimmer and the mischief in them made a section of her under eyes quiver. 

“I was just thinking… we’ve spent so much time in my quarters, and none in yours so far. If you won’t be long, and I already walked all the way here, I might as well stay, no?” The expression on Cullen’s face had to have talked of more than just surprise, because the Inquisitor immediately back-pedaled. “Or… would that make you uncomfortable?”

He opened his lips to reply, but she interrupted.

“Take a moment to think about it. There is no rush,” she said.

Lavellan, her arms casually crossed behind her back, took a stroll through his office. Considering one thing, then another. A banner here, a book there. She wasn’t picking anything up, not even touching it. She was just… being.

Slinking in and out of her chambers had been a break from what his own bed held for him. Sometimes he had been able to nap there, up in the tower, with her fingers gently scraping over the back of his skull. Sometimes they just worked, or read side by side. Sometimes they played games. Sometimes they shared some wine and talked. 

Would it be different? Odd? Having her up there? In the place that rarely anyone entered, that was his haven and witness to his worst moments?

“You can join me later in my quarters, if you’re unsure,” Lavellan suggested gently. “I won’t take it personally if you don’t.” 

And so she moved, once again, to take her leave. 

_ Or would it cleanse them _ , he wondered as he rhythmically drummed his fingertips onto the desk,  _ to bring a few good memories up there? _

“No! No… I want you to stay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. Very much so.”

Lavellan’s face started beaming so earnestly that Cullen didn’t quite know what to do with himself. 

It felt to him as if he were a dried bedsheet that’d been tossed around by the wind on the drying line, but was finally laid down and folded. The Commander suddenly remembered, as he always did, why he liked having Lavellan around; her presence was all-encompassing and reassuring. Comforting, even. As if any and all things were going to be alright. Every doubt he’d had fell off his mind.

“I’m sure,” he insisted, more to himself than to her, and walked around his desk. He was taking off his metal gloves to be able to better grab onto the ladder’s steps, when he remembered Lavellan’s incomplete left arm. “But how will you-”

His gaze followed the ladder all the way up to the loft. It was up high. Too high.

“What about me makes you think I can’t take a challenge?” she retorted lightly. 

Cullen chuckled and placed his gloves on the desk. “That’s a risky thing to say to a man into whose quarters you have just invited yourself.”

The woman gasped theatrically, slim eyes opened wide, and laid a hand to her chest. “Commander, are you…  _ mocking _ me?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Cullen replied.

He was almost surprised at the softness in his own voice, and clearly Lavellan was taken aback for a second, too. But in the end she laughed silently.

“So-,” he cleared his throat. “Shall I go up ahead, or-?”

“And then what? Pull me up by a rope like a sack of wheat?”

Cullen paused as he contemplated that suggestion. 

“Absolutely not,” Amaryll half laughed.

“Then-?”

“I go up first,” she decided. “You can catch me if you like. Should I fall, that is. Which I won’t.”

“Inquisitor,” he said as an acknowledgement to her firm tone, and took a shallow bow.

Lavellan made a throw-away gesture, but she did grin. Then she turned to walk closer to her challenger. With her hand on one of the steps, she turned her head to give him a confident smirk similar to the one she had displayed before. Only that this time she’d pressed her lips together. And that it didn’t quite convince Cullen that this was a good idea after all.

“Are you- agh. Are you  _ certain _ I can’t do anything to help?” He asked.

“If I need anything, I’ll ask,” she replied and put her left foot onto the lowest step. “I want to do this on my own.”

With the strength in her right arm and shoulder, the elf pulled herself up, placed her right foot next to her other one, and her left underarm on the step below where her hand was holding her up. Cullen watched with concern how Lavellan shifted some weight to press her underarm into the step so that she could have her hand let go and reach for the next one. Hastily, clumsily, before she would lose balance. This way she proceeded to climb the long ladder. At an even slower pace than Cullen usually took when his flare ups were acting up. She was holding herself as closely to its structures as she could. But eventually, the Inquisitor made it to the top. Leaning on her underarm again, she lifted herself up and rolled gracelessly onto the wooden floor of the loft. 

“Maker,” Cullen mumbled. 

He was relieved, for the most part, that he there had been no need to save the Inquisitor from an unduly fall. The smaller part of him was slightly embarrassed at having seen the usually so composed woman in an awkward situation.

“Are you alright up there?” he shouted, already placing his hands on a step above his shoulders’ height. Once he heard a  _ Mh-hm _ , he started climbing as fast as his back could manage. 

Having finally arrived up top, he took care to make his climb onto the platform with a bit more grace than Lavellan. Cullen was proud of that, and of having successfully worked over the pains in his back. Until he saw that the Inquisitor was, for once, not studying him with one of her looks that were equal parts warmth and amusement. Amaryll Lavellan was standing in front of the section of the loft that, after three years, had never been rebuilt. 

The roof had crumbled, the wooden boards of the ceiling given way to the tree that spread its branches into the previously unoccupied space. Orange and red leaves were sprinkled across the wooden floor. Dust shimmered and danced in the air as the descending sun’s light touched it. There was no inch of the place that was not covered in at least a little bit of debris, dirt, or dried leaves. 

“Ach... I- I have been meaning to fix it,” Cullen said once he was on his feet. No response came, which he found odd. Had she not heard him? “There was always so much to do-”

He stepped closer until he was standing right next to her and could see her face.

She was-

She was tearing up.

Staring at the tree’s branches, at the spectacle in front of her, with an expression of such sublime and blissful admiration, desperate yearning, that it knocked the breath out of him. He had never seen the Inquisitor like this. Not swept away as she was now. Cullen couldn’t tear his eyes off her. The peace and anguish and the love in her expression, at the sight of something so mundane to him, was captivating.

“D’you remember when we first came to Skyhold?” she asked after a minute or so. “Everything was a pile of overgrown rubble.” Lavellan turned her head to meet his eyes, and smiled. Slowly, deliberately, with a radiating glow. “You were complaining about the fortifications, and Josephine about how the animals were scaring off nobles. There were birds nesting, rats running about. Plants that claimed the stone, everywhere, making it brittle. You’d’ve thought the roof was about to collapse any moment. But it held. When we needed it, it held.” 

Cullen saw it. Right before his eyes, there it was. The tent he’d slept in when they first reached Skyhold, exhausted. The pains he’d had after the strenuous time of walking. The shaky table he’d had while he was working in the lower courtyard. The stones that crunched under his boots when Josephine, Lavellan, Leliana and him had first entered the main hall. And the light. The sunlight that had broken through the more or less intact windows, bounced off the walls and the rubble and the vines. It’d made everything… glow.

He could not have been sadder in this moment, nor happier.

“I remember,” was the only thing he could bring himself to say, and Lavellan smiled even broader. Smiled in a way that showed him she knew the pictures that his mind had conjured, and that she’d seen the very same thing. The connection they shared in this instant, it left a rippling inside of him. Like a stone skipping on water.

Cullen could barely breathe. His chest felt so heavy compared to moments ago. He wanted to move. To leap, to battle, to deliciously writhe between smooth sheets. To gasp and to stretch and to touch and to tear. To claim and to beg and to give and to  _ worship _ . He yearned for unimaginable pain, and for sweetness, and for heat to match the one inside him. 

He felt achingly alive. A pull inside of him knew that he could feel  _ divine _ . If only… if only…

“Do you feel alright?” Amaryll asked, taking a step to face him. 

_ Would you _ , he thought,  _ prefer to be asked for permission to be kissed?  _

She raised her hand to his cheek, and it felt like a hit. Numbingly cold, yet torching. 

_ Or is passion alone offering enough? _

“You’re looking a little red,” she continued. Her voice now carried a twinge of concern. “What is it? Do you need to lie down? Are you in pain?”

_ It’s you.  _

That’s what it was. It was her, as it had always been. In the Maker’s flame and Andraste’s grace, she had been made into a shard of sun. Whatever her hand touched, she lit on fire. She devoured her enemies whole, cleansed wretchedness with burning eyes, carefully placed kindlings within her followers. 

Cullen lifted his hand to touch hers. To his surprise, her fingers were warmer now. Soft, solid. Summer light made flesh.

All worry, shame, and insecurity Cullen could have felt had been burned away. There was nothing within him but this hectic fever. He knew not how to rid himself of it, except for to lay it down before the one who had sparked it.

And so he reached for her, the person who’d given him a second chance and a third, who had cast judgement on his sins and who had made it possible for him to repent - placed his hands on her waist, and knelt down before her.

Amaryll’s eyes opened wide at the sudden gesture. Surprise kept words from leaving her mouth as she looked down at the Commander at her feet. His face was open like a painting, inviting to be read. The soft tension in his stubbled cheeks, his heightened brows, his lips and his scar, the heated devotion in his deep-set eyes. It was all there. But could she see?

Amaryll’s lips parted a little, confusion yielding to affection. Her hand, which she had dropped earlier, now smoothed lovingly through Cullen’s locks. 

“You’re beautiful,” she said warmly, and the man at her feet beamed back at her. 

“You don’t even know,” he replied after a while, and before she could say the joke on her tongue, he grabbed her elbows and pulled her down into a kiss.


End file.
